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Best practices for saving, consolidating, collecting… moving often between 2 locations
I’m going back and forth daily between 2 locations. I need to work on the same project in both locations daily. Best I can do at the moment is an external USB2 drive that’s portable enough and large enough to house the files.
Not sure if it’s too slow to just keep everything external and take the same drive back and forth, if that will eliminate lost footage errors, etc.
If so, what’s the best way to manage some of the dependencies? Should I be creating external folder structure first then mirroring that in AE?
Should I be just pulling things into AE, setting up a sensible folder structure within AE, then save with a collect files command?
What is recommended for this situation? thx.
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3 Replies
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Ae will seamlessly relink files if the relative path of the assets to the project file is the same.
I keep entire projects in sync between my workstation and my laptop, and even between members of my team, with Dropbox. Because we keep assets organized in project folders religiously, we never have issues relinking.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
My first thought was to go with Dropbox, but I thought it might be too slow as the internet can be dodgy around here.
If I understand… relative path means regardless of which drive… so long as everything from the project down, right?
Sounds like you’ve ironed out exactly the sort of issues I need straightened, so at which stage are you organizing? Prior to importing into AE in the finder? Doing all organizing prior to beginning AE project? After the fact by collecting to force finder to match organizing done in AE?
Just looking for a formula to stick with. thx
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[Greg Sage] “If I understand… relative path means regardless of which drive… so long as everything from the project down, right?”
Yes — relative means that you can express the path to the file without relying on absolutes like drive letters and volume name. You can look at how Collect Files organizes footage files for an example:
— Collected files folder
—— Collected files.aep
—— (Footage)
———— image.jpg
———— video.movThat does not mean that the footage folders have to be subordinate the location of the project file; they just have to be accessible using “..” previous directory path references without ever referencing some element of structure that’s different between computers (like drive letter / volume name might be, or a different directory structure from system to system). This layout works, too:
— Assets
—— image.jpg
—— video.mov
— Project Files
—— Uncollected files v1.aep
—— Uncollected files v2.aep[Greg Sage] “Sounds like you’ve ironed out exactly the sort of issues I need straightened, so at which stage are you organizing? Prior to importing into AE in the finder? Doing all organizing prior to beginning AE project? After the fact by collecting to force finder to match organizing done in AE?”
I generally organize prior to import. If I need to bring an asset into my AEP, I first copy/move it into my project’s asset folder, then import it from there.
The only time I don’t do this is when multiple projects rely on a single shared asset that is subject to change, as the method above could lead to versioning issues of that asset.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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